My family's life has been turned upside down the last week or so. Our TV watching habits have changed recently and, frankly, we're tapping on each other's nerves.

We're on vacation. Primarily, our vacation is a road trip (yes, with these gas prices) and we're camping in several different places across the American west. But for the last few days, we've been parked in the foothills of the Sierras at the home of our good family friends. The views are wonderful, the air is clear, and just over the crest behind the house lies Yosemite Valley.

TV is pervasive. In some ways, that's a good thing. A few weeks ago, a major hail storm struck and there was danger of tornadoes, and the TV was our primary link to knowing when we needed to run for cover. But what else is it good for? In our little family, we found that:

• It distracted us from talking with one another
• Books sat on the shelf unread. Our minds were not expanding
• Our entertainment consisted of what someone else created; there was no imagination
• We'd schedule our days around what we wanted to watch. Out having a good time? Better cut it short for our 9:00 program

So about 3 months ago we called our cable provider and told them we wanted to cancel our subscription. Expecting a detox time, we braced ourselves with some DVDs to help us ease the transition. The day the cable company cut the wire, I checked the TV and saw static. Then I turned it off, and surprisingly we never looked back. In the past 3 months, we've begun reading again. We work from home, and we've struck a better balance between work and personal life. And best of all, we're more like a family now. We spend time eating together, doing projects together, actually living. We've seen once again what a big world it is.

That's what TVFreeLiving is all about.

Get Out and Live!

Over 10 years ago, my wife and I decided to out TV from our lives. We are not television snobs, far from teetotalers, and believe that many aspects of life can be enjoyed in moderation. But television had become something of a negative for us, and we wondered what our lives would be like if we tried giving it up for a short period and then see what happened. We did, choosing the period of Lent in 1995, and that short period continues to this day.

(Originally published in The Daily Mail on Oct 1, 2005)

The studio audience is chanting as the tow women — a wife and a mistress — square up to each other over an errant husband. 'Bitch or whore? Bitch or whore? Bitch or whore?' the crowd shouts. Then, in a new expression of on-air hostility, the two rivals strip naked and scream obscenities before lunging at each other like two 16-stone animals, trading punches. The rhapsodic chanting reaches a crescendo. It has been another good day for the Jerry Springer television show. Thousands of miles away from that Chicago TV studio, in the seaside town of Hastings, East Sussex, I remembered that episode as I stood in Queen's Arcade at the entrance to the attic where John Logie Baird, the inventor of the world's first 'seeing by wireless machine,' conducted his early experiments.